Trump Tied Billions in Grants to His Policies; Two Courts Struck Down the Conditions

On February 21, 2025, President Donald Trump asked Maine Governor Janet Mills whether she would comply with his order on transgender athletes. She said she was complying with state and federal law.¹ "Well, we are the federal law. You’d better do it. You’d better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t," Trump answered, as a federal court in Maine recounted.¹ The Agriculture Department then froze funding that reached Maine's Child Nutrition Program.¹

On April 11, 2025, Judge John A. Woodcock Jr. ordered the frozen funds released.¹ In that emergency order the court found approximately $3 million already frozen and a likelihood of irreparable harm: although meal-reimbursement accounts remained accessible, blocked food-purchase and administrative funds threatened providers' ability to feed children and vulnerable adults.¹ Woodcock did not decide the athletics dispute; he found the state likely to succeed because the Agriculture Department skipped required procedures and targeted food-assistance funding rather than the athletics programs allegedly violating Title IX.¹ Maine Public reported that the department agreed in May 2025 to end the challenged freeze in exchange for dismissal of the suit.²

That was the method. Trump used money Congress had authorized for transportation and protection against terrorism to demand obedience from states and cities: help enforce immigration law or put transportation funding at risk; change election procedures or lose part of the counterterrorism award.³⁴ Two federal district courts struck those conditions down because Congress had not authorized the demands.³⁴

His Words, Then His Signature

Trump also signed the funding orders himself.⁵⁶ The one he signed on April 28, 2025 went to every executive department and agency.⁶

Executive Order 14287, 'Protecting American Communities From Criminal Aliens,' § 3(a)⁶

the head of each executive department or agency (agency), in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and as permitted by law, shall identify appropriate Federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions, including grants and contracts, for suspension or termination, as appropriate.

The Choice the States Were Given

At the Transportation Department, Secretary Sean Duffy imposed an immigration-enforcement condition on federal transportation grants, not just highway grants.³ Twenty states sued.³ The Rhode Island district court described their choice: surrender control over their own law-enforcement resources or forgo billions of dollars in federal funds.³

The Massachusetts Attorney General's office said the state receives over $1.6 billion in transportation-grant funding, supporting roads, bridges, transit for seniors and people with disabilities, and traffic-safety work.⁷ The court did not require the states to wait for a funding cutoff before suing.³

On November 4, 2025, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ruled for the states on the merits.³ He found that the department had inserted the Immigration Enforcement Condition (IEC) to coerce immigration cooperation, and that it exceeded the department's authority and violated both the Administrative Procedure Act and the Spending Clause.³

California et al. v. U.S. Department of Transportation, No. 1:25-cv-00208, Order (summary judgment)³

The IEC is declared unlawful and ordered vacated from all grant agreements administered by Defendants. Defendants are permanently enjoined from implementing or enforcing the IEC against the States, or otherwise attempting to condition federal transportation funding on State cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement.

The government moved on January 13, 2026 to dismiss its own appeal, the Massachusetts Attorney General announced the next day.⁷

The Strongest Defense, and Why It Failed

The best defense begins with a real power: government can attach conditions to federal money.⁸ In South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court upheld Congress's decision to withhold 5% of funds under specified highway grant programs from states that allowed people under twenty-one to buy alcohol.⁸ The administration argued that its transportation condition required only compliance with existing federal law, was reasonably related to the grants and was not impermissibly coercive.³

McConnell rejected that defense.³ The condition demanded cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement, which goes beyond complying with existing law, and the transportation statutes did not delegate authority to impose it.³ The court found no reasonable relationship between that demand and the transportation programs paying the grants, and identified ambiguous terms as a further defect.³ Dole permitted a condition Congress enacted; it did not give executive agencies authority to invent conditions of their own.⁸³

Trump's orders included legal limits on what agencies could do.⁵⁶ The April order said "as permitted by law"; an earlier one, signed January 20, 2025, directed the Attorney General and the Homeland Security Secretary, to the maximum extent possible under law, to evaluate and undertake lawful actions to deny federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions.⁵⁶ Neither order supplied statutory authority for a new grant condition.⁵⁶³ On February 5, 2025, Attorney General Pamela Bondi directed a freeze on Justice Department funds to sanctuary jurisdictions, as Judge William H. Orrick of the Northern District of California recounted.⁹ Orrick rejected the legal-saving language as a shield for the sanctuary directives: the Bondi directive categorically denied grants before determining whether a freeze would be lawful.¹⁰ On April 24, 2025, he found the plaintiff cities and counties likely to succeed and preliminarily barred enforcement of the sanctuary-funding conditions against them; on January 20, 2026, he denied the administration's motion to dismiss, which let the challenge proceed.⁹¹¹

A President can set enforcement priorities and seek new legislation.¹² Those powers do not erase the statutory limits on a grant program.³

Change Election Procedures or Lose 20%

In June 2026 the method reached elections: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) threatened to withhold 20% of counterterrorism awards, over $200 million, unless states met election-administration conditions.⁴ The conditions required a plan to replace voting systems that used barcodes or QR codes to count votes with equipment accepting hand-marked paper ballots, and changes to audits, ballot reconciliation, and voter and poll-worker citizenship verification.⁴ Trump had signed an order on March 25, 2025 directing the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to prioritize voting-system standards and testing when funding election offices through homeland-security grants, consistently with law.¹³

The jurisdictions would have to pay for compliance themselves; Judge Amir H. Ali cited credible evidence of $7.25 million in projected printing-equipment costs for Dallas County alone.⁴ On September 28, 2026, he vacated the conditions, the holdback and the August implementing guidance because FEMA had exceeded its statutory authority.⁴

The government won a separate claim seeking review outside the Administrative Procedure Act, because that law already provided a way to challenge the agency.⁴ Ali added no permanent injunction, since setting the conditions aside was sufficient relief, and dismissed the constitutional claims without deciding them, leaving the plaintiffs free to bring them again.⁴ An unchallenged requirement to spend at least 3% on physical and cyber election security remained in force.⁴

The pressure was not confined to those two conditions.¹⁴¹⁵ Reuters reported that FEMA required states and cities not to boycott Israeli companies to qualify for disaster-preparedness funding, a condition covering at least $1.9 billion, and that the administration removed the boycott language on August 4, 2025.¹⁶ Axios reported on June 29, 2025 that Trump threatened financial penalties for New York City if Zohran Mamdani became mayor and did not follow his demands: "Whoever's mayor of New York is going to have to behave themselves or the federal government is coming down very tough on them financially."¹⁴ In February 2025, FEMA had taken back roughly $80 million already paid to New York City for migrant shelter and services, and the Government Accountability Office identified Trump's January 20, 2025 order among the directives applied to Shelter and Services Program funds.¹⁷¹⁸ FEMA's acting administrator cited concerns that recipients were engaged in or facilitating illegal activities, according to his declaration reproduced in the city's complaint.¹⁷ GAO separately found that FEMA's withholding of prior-year Shelter and Services Program funds violated the Impoundment Control Act.¹⁸ The city's emergency request for return of its money failed because it had not shown irreparable harm, the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse reports.¹⁹

ABC News reported on October 2, 2025 that Trump openly proposed using the shutdown to cut funds for Democratic-run states and cities, and that Vice President JD Vance denied political targeting.²⁰ Speaker Mike Johnson defended prioritizing the administration's policies during the shutdown, according to the same report.²⁰ The Energy Department accepted in a court stipulation, filed July 15, 2026, that the Office of Management and Budget selected 284 grants from a larger set proposed for termination, solely by state political identity; the admissions apply only to that lawsuit and its awards.¹⁵ The department then announced it had terminated those 284 grants.¹⁵ On January 12, 2026, Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled for one group of plaintiffs on a Fifth Amendment equal-protection claim and vacated termination notices for seven awards; a stipulated judgment on June 11 applied that reasoning to vacate notices for eleven more.²¹

Why This Belongs in an Impeachment Case

The Constitution gives Congress the spending power and provides for presidential impeachment under Article II, Section 4; Alexander Hamilton described impeachable offenses as abuses of public trust.¹²²² The 2019 House impeachment charged Trump with withholding Ukraine assistance for personal political benefit; the Senate acquitted him, 48 guilty votes to 52 not guilty, short of the required two-thirds.²³²⁴

Trump threatened Maine himself and signed the orders.¹⁶ His agencies imposed the transportation and election conditions, putting billions in transportation funding and over $200 million in counterterrorism awards at risk, until two federal courts struck them down.³⁴ That is an abuse of the presidency's control over public money, and it belongs in an impeachment case: grants for public purposes became pressure to obtain obedience, through demands Congress had not authorized.³⁴